In the News

The Senate approved Richard Revesz’s nomination by voice vote to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, housed within the White House Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the regulatory process across the government, approves government information collections, establishes government statistical practices and coordinates federal privacy policy. Revesz “is one of the nation’s leading voices in the fields of environmental and regulatory law and policy,” said the announcement from the White House in September when President Biden nominated him.

By filing an amicus brief on Wednesday, the Institute for Policy Integrity challenged the American Petroleum Act's arguments that the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act bars the Department of Interior from considering nonlocal environmental effects resulting from offshore development. In the brief, IPI urged the D.C. Circuit to uphold the district court's ruling that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management violated NEPA and to reject arguments that the Inflation Reduction Act moots the issue of whether Lease Sale 257 violated NEPA.

The Institute for Policy Integrity is urging officials to create granular assessments of emissions tied to grid electricity used to generate hydrogen, while also placing robust requirements on the use of renewable energy credits to offset emissions from such power.

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law examined the question, “How Do We Know if Hydrogen is Clean?” and noted that "the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act includes “major incentives for ‘clean’ hydrogen. Now agencies need to decide what counts as clean.” The institute gave the Department of Energy, which is charged with developing a standard for clean hydrogen, a series of recommendations.

EPA has led the way in crafting these types of metrics in the past, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. The agency began working on the social cost of methane and integrated it into some rulemakings before the Interagency Working Group undertook its own work. "The approaches that EPA took and that of the Interagency Working Group ultimately were consistent with each other — if that's any indication of what might be happening here," Sarinsky said.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 9-2 on Wednesday afternoon to report favorably out of committee Richard Revesz’s nomination to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the regulatory process across the government, approves government information collections, establishes government statistical practices and coordinates federal privacy policy.

The “Major Questions Doctrine” will hang over every regulatory decision made by the Biden administration and may slow their production of new regulations. This slowing is particularly important because, as President Biden’s nominee Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Richard Revesz, has noted, it now often takes two terms for presidents to implement their regulatory agendas.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved the nomination of Richard Revesz to lead the White House regulatory review shop. The committee voted 9-2 for Revesz, who founded the New York University-affiliated Institute for Policy Integrity 14 years ago, to direct the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The bipartisan vote means Richard Revesz is almost certain to be confirmed.

Democrats’ projected hold on their slim Senate majority in the next Congress could give the party and the Biden administration additional flexibility to confirm dozens of judicial picks and remaining nominees at EPA and other agencies that are important to their environmental policy agenda. President Joe Biden has tapped Richard Revesz to serve as the administrator of the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs that oversees EPA and other agencies rules, and the Senate environment committee has scheduled a Nov. 17 hearing to consider two Biden picks to serve on the Chemical Safety Board.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is being roundly urged to set clearer metrics and be more transparent in the scorecard it is developing to track EPA and other agencies’ progress implementing the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, with dozens of groups submitting comments in response to CEQ’s August request for information (RFI). Al Huang, who directs the EJ program at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU’s School of Law, tells Inside EPA that the scorecard creates goals in three buckets: educing disproportionate burdens in communities; ensuring agencies fulfill their Justice40 spending obligations; and establishing EJ infrastructure and creating systems within agencies to confront EJ issues. However, Huang notes there are “a lot of question marks” about how the administration will collect data, what role, if any, EJ communities will have in contributing to the scoring, and whether the flow of money alone will be considered a benefit to EJ communities regardless of how it is used.